Covid Patients that Develop Severe Psychotic Symptoms

[Halbhh]

The latest data for England, based on the Covid infection survey, which randomly samples households for coronavirus, reveals 21% of almost 8,200 participants who were followed up after testing positive still had symptoms five weeks after infection, with 9.9% reporting symptoms 12 weeks after infection.

Long Covid alarm as 21% report symptoms after five weeks

12 weeks. That's quite long. 10% of infections doing that? Man, that's really concerning.

In the U.S., there have been about 25 million detected cases.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

I couldn't read at The Independent (a source I like) because not registered for free trial, but was able to search up the same info I think from The Guardian (another great newspaper). Did The Guardian get all the interesting facts? --

Almost 30% of Covid patients in England readmitted to hospital after discharge – study

Yep, almost identical.

(btw it was The Telegraph, not the Independent - I like to get both sides ).

 

[Halbhh]

Yep, almost identical.

(btw it was The Telegraph, not the Independent - I like to get both sides ).

So, the really big thing there was as in the follow up in post #21 -- that 10% still symptomatic after 12 weeks, and then doing the numbers. It's an astounding number if it turns out to last. We can hope it resolves without serious long term damage, say within a year. But if it lasts, that would be so serious, because of the 10% rate.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

The latest data for England, based on the Covid infection survey, which randomly samples households for coronavirus, reveals 21% of almost 8,200 participants who were followed up after testing positive still had symptoms five weeks after infection, with 9.9% reporting symptoms 12 weeks after infection.

Long Covid alarm as 21% report symptoms after five weeks

12 weeks. That's quite long. 10% of infections doing that? Man, that's really concerning.

In the U.S., there have been about 25 million detected cases.

I had a viral infection 7 years ago, which has caused symptoms, on and off, since then. I think it's some kind of auto-immune/inflammatory response. I certainly recognise some of the long Covid symptoms...

 

[Halbhh]

A new article on the continuing reports of some small portion having psychotic or paranoid effects:

Ivan Agerton pulled his wife, Emily, into their bedroom closet, telling her not to bring her cellphone.

“I believe people are following me,” he said, his eyes flaring with fear.

He described the paranoid delusions haunting him: that people in cars driving into their suburban Seattle cul-de-sac were spying on him, that a SWAT officer was crouching in a bush in their yard.

It was a drastic change for the 49-year-old Mr. Agerton, a usually unflappable former marine and risk-taking documentary photographer whose most recent adventure involved exploring the Red Sea for two months in a submarine. He was accustomed to stress and said that neither he nor his family had previously experienced mental health issues.

But in mid-December, after a mild case of Covid-19, he was seized by a kind of psychosis that turned life into a nightmare. He couldn’t sleep, worried he had somehow done something wrong, suspected ordinary people of sinister motives and eventually was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward twice.

“Like a light switch — it happened this fast — this intense paranoia hit me,” Mr. Agerton said in interviews over two months. “It was really single-handedly the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.”

Mr. Agerton’s experience reflects a phenomenon doctors are increasingly reporting: psychotic symptoms emerging weeks after coronavirus infection in some people with no previous mental illness.

Doctors say such symptoms may be one manifestation of brain-related aftereffects of Covid-19. Along with more common issues like brain fog, memory loss and neurological problems, “new onset” psychosis may result from an immune response, vascular issues or inflammation from the disease process, experts hypothesize. Sporadic cases have occurred with other viruses, and while such extreme symptoms are likely to affect only a small proportion of Covid survivors, cases have emerged worldwide.
...(continues)
First Covid, Then Psychosis: ‘The Most Terrifying Thing I’ve Ever Experienced’ - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

 

[Halbhh]

I had a viral infection 7 years ago, which has caused symptoms, on and off, since then. I think it's some kind of auto-immune/inflammatory response. I certainly recognise some of the long Covid symptoms...

Hopefully you are doing well? I just was reading a new article, just posted an excerpt above.

 

[anna ~ grace]

Already, we have heard many reports about lasting unexpected effects of Covid on healthy younger people...

Now this:


Almost immediately, Dr. Hisam Goueli could tell that the patient who came to his psychiatric hospital on Long Island this summer was unusual.

The patient, a 42-year-old physical therapist and mother of four young children, had never had psychiatric symptoms or any family history of mental illness. Yet there she was, sitting at a table in a beige-walled room at South Oaks Hospital in Amityville, N.Y., sobbing and saying that she kept seeing her children, ages 2 to 10, being gruesomely murdered and that she herself had crafted plans to kill them.
...
The only notable thing about her medical history was that the woman, who declined to be interviewed but allowed Dr. Goueli to describe her case, had become infected with the coronavirus in the spring. She had experienced only mild physical symptoms from the virus, but, months later, she heard a voice that first told her to kill herself and then told her to kill her children.
...
... Dr. Goueli was unsure whether the coronavirus was connected to the woman’s psychological symptoms. “Maybe this is Covid-related, maybe it’s not,” he recalled thinking.

“But then,” he said, “we saw a second case, a third case and a fourth case, and we’re like, ‘There’s something happening.’”

Indeed, doctors are reporting similar cases across the country and around the world. A small number of Covid patients who had never experienced mental health problems are developing severe psychotic symptoms weeks after contracting the coronavirus.
...
A 36-year-old nursing home employee in North Carolina who became so paranoid that she believed her three children would be kidnapped and, to save them, tried to pass them through a fast-food restaurant’s drive-through window.

A 30-year-old construction worker in New York City who became so delusional that he imagined his cousin was going to murder him, and, to protect himself, he tried to strangle his cousin in bed.
...

...Physically, most of these patients didn’t get very sick from Covid-19, reports indicate. The patients that Dr. Goueli treated experienced no respiratory problems, but they did have subtle neurological symptoms like hand tingling, vertigo, headaches or diminished smell. Then, two weeks to several months later, he said, they “develop this profound psychosis, which is really dangerous and scary to all of the people around them.”

Also striking is that most patients have been in their 30s, 40s and 50s. “It’s very rare for you to develop this type of psychosis in this age range,” Dr. Goueli said, since such symptoms more typically accompany schizophrenia in young people or dementia in older patients. ...

...
The symptoms have ranged widely, some surprisingly severe for a first psychotic episode, experts said. Dr. Goueli said a 46-year-old pharmacy technician, whose family brought her in after she became fearful that evil spirits had invaded her home, “cried literally for four days” in the hospital.

He said the 30-year-old construction worker, brought to the hospital by the police, became “extremely violent,” dismantling a hospital radiator and using its parts and his shoes to try to break out of a window. He also swung a chair at hospital staff.
....
(continues)

Small Number of Covid Patients Develop Severe Psychotic Symptoms

This sounds very demonic.

 

[Halbhh]

This sounds very demonic.

Well, I think that would be distinguishable, that there would be a noticeable difference in tone and effects vs just the paranoia or such from Covid. For example, there is another newer article just above in post #25 to add to the examples.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Hopefully you are doing well? I just was reading a new article, just posted an excerpt above.

I'm pretty good at present, thanks - had a serious flare-up at the end of November that turned me into a shivering, shaking, trembling wreck - a mass of 'fasiculations' (muscle twitches); also sore neck, brain fog, and mild inner ear dizziness & disorientation. I spent a night in hospital having every test & scan under the sun (including lumbar puncture). All they found was low vitamin B12, so they gave me a jab of it and kicked me out. Since then it's been a slow recovery. I suspect it's an inflammatory (immunological?) condition affecting the CNS, which was probably exacerbated by low vit.B12. It tends to come on following physical stress - e.g. overdoing exercise, but can come on in minutes, last a few hours, and then go from feeling really rough back to fairly OK in half an hour, so unlikely to be lingering virus.

No psychosis, but I did notice that it affected my mood and preferences, so that my viewing & reading preferences changed while I was unwell. My visual short focus has become much worse - I now need reading glasses, and I tend to misinterpret brief events at the periphery of my vision, so that reflections, shadows, floaters, etc., catch my attention as something moving more than usual; indications of CNS involvement. It's a bit odd, but now I know I'm otherwise physically in good order, it doesn't bother me too much.

I'm taking a fairly high dose (4,000IU) of vit.D, as an immunological modulator for Covid protection, but it may be helping this problem too...

But really, I think I've been lucky - there were people in much worse trouble than me in hospital - the guy opposite me in the hospital ward had a liver transplant and was a little psychotic and understandably terrified of catching Covid - which wasn't helped by the patient next-but-one from him testing positive and being moved out, after which we were all given 14 days isolation notifications... Dangerous places, hospitals!

 

[Tanj]

I found out last night that a former colleague of mine in Europe got COVID, spent weeks on a ventilator, got out of hospital, went back in 2 weeks later with blood clots on the lung and then developed paralysis. He's currently learning to walk again.

 

[essentialsaltes]

LINK

A major study published Tuesday suggests as many as one in three people infected with Covid-19 are left with longer term mental health or neurological symptoms.

Researchers found that 34% of coronavirus survivors received a diagnosis for a neurological or psychological condition within six months of infection, according to the research published in the journal Lancet Psychiatry.

The most common diagnosis was anxiety, found in 17% of those treated for Covid-19, followed by mood disorders, found in 14% of patients, CNN's Ryan Prior writes.

"Our results indicate that brain diseases and psychiatric disorders are more common after Covid-19 than after flu or other respiratory infections, even when patients are matched for other risk factors," said Maxime Taquet, an academic clinical fellow in psychiatry at the University of Oxford, and a co-author of the new report .

 

[Halbhh]

...

Remember our discussion earlier about Covid-induced psychosis?

I was just reading this article, which I thought you'd be interested to see, and then look what I found in the article....

Murders Spiked in 2020 in Cities Across the United States
The year-to-year increase in homicides from 2019 was the largest since national record-keeping began in 1960. But overall, major crimes declined last year.
...
... Late last May, the police in southwest Albuquerque were dispatched to an imitation adobe home to discover that Lee Marco Cuellar had killed his wife during an argument, strangling her with a sleeveless white T-shirt.

Mr. Cuellar, 41, an R.O.T.C. instructor at a local middle school, told the officers that after dinner with his wife — Rosalejandra Cisneros-Cuellar, 26, known as Ally — he became convinced that she was a demon who would hurt his family, so he had to kill her, according to the criminal complaint.

Murders Spiked in 2020 in Cities Across the United States

 

[Halbhh]

Another view:

Change in U.S. Murders From Previous Year
There is no precedent for last year's [2020] increase in the number of murders.
Murder Rose by Almost 30% in 2020.

https://twitter.com/crimealytics/status/1441000491694104582

 

[SkyWriting]

Another view:

Change in U.S. Murders From Previous Year
There is no precedent for last year's [2020] increase in the number of murders.
Murder Rose by Almost 30% in 2020.

https://twitter.com/crimealytics/status/1441000491694104582

One of the main reasons people get angry is because they feel like they don't control their lives.
I think we had somebody stirring the hornets nest that year.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Remember our discussion earlier about Covid-induced psychosis?

I was just reading this article, which I thought you'd be interested to see, and then look what I found in the article....

Murders Spiked in 2020 in Cities Across the United States
The year-to-year increase in homicides from 2019 was the largest since national record-keeping began in 1960. But overall, major crimes declined last year.
...
... Late last May, the police in southwest Albuquerque were dispatched to an imitation adobe home to discover that Lee Marco Cuellar had killed his wife during an argument, strangling her with a sleeveless white T-shirt.

Mr. Cuellar, 41, an R.O.T.C. instructor at a local middle school, told the officers that after dinner with his wife — Rosalejandra Cisneros-Cuellar, 26, known as Ally — he became convinced that she was a demon who would hurt his family, so he had to kill her, according to the criminal complaint.

Murders Spiked in 2020 in Cities Across the United States

Yes, that's a really big spike - but I think SkyWriting may have a point - this may well be a cultural response to the social situation rather than a direct Covid symptom, i.e. an indirect effect. I would want to see clear correlations with a diagnosis of psychosis in other countries before taking it seriously.

For example, in the UK (England & Wales), homicides dropped 16% in the year to March 2021, which suggests that it's not a direct Covid symptom...

 

[Halbhh]

Yes, that's a really big spike - but I think SkyWriting may have a point - this may well be a cultural response to the social situation rather than a direct Covid symptom, i.e. an indirect effect. I would want to see clear correlations with a diagnosis of psychosis in other countries before taking it seriously.

For example, in the UK (England & Wales), homicides dropped 16% in the year to March 2021, which suggests that it's not a direct Covid symptom...

Covid effects on the brain are not only real but also more common than we knew. See @essentialsaltes post #31 above, to get a sense of how widespread mental effects are. Ergo, we need research on this, however unexpected it is...

 

[Halbhh]

One of the main reasons people get angry is because they feel like they don't control their lives.
I think we had somebody stirring the hornets nest that year.

And then there are the very real mental effects of things that alter neural chemistry and such, including some infections.....

See post #1 for example, the OP.

 

[Halbhh]

For example, in the UK (England & Wales), homicides dropped 16% in the year to March 2021, which suggests that it's not a direct Covid symptom...

Continuing....since the Covid effects on the brain (when they happen) include such things as anxiety and/or paranoia or even delusional thoughts...then of course a different culture could respond differently.

In a place with a lot more guns per capita and more confrontational culture, it might be that shootings happen more. In a culture with a different mindset, like the UK, the response to anxiety or paranoid thoughts could be different, of course, since the culture helps shape the response to an impulsive thought or feeling.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Covid effects on the brain are not only real but also more common than we knew. See @essentialsaltes post #31 above, to get a sense of how widespread mental effects are. Ergo, we need research on this, however unexpected it is...

Yes, we always need more research. Neurological and psychiatric symptoms are not uncommon with viral infections capable of CNS penetration. The question is, are there more cases of psychosis directly due to Covid than is usual with such viruses, or are the unusual social circumstances contributing more?

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Continuing....since the Covid effects on the brain (when they happen) include such things as anxiety and/or paranoia or even delusional thoughts...then of course a different culture could respond differently.

In a place with a lot more guns per capita and more confrontational culture, it might be that shootings happen more. In a culture with a different mindset, like the UK, the response to anxiety or paranoid thoughts could be different, of course, since the culture helps shape the response to an impulsive thought or feeling.

This would make it extremely difficult to disentangle sociocultural factors from direct disease effects.